This is about a certain Miss. Eternal who got an offer from a famous company named Centillion. This post serves to expose conspiracy theories about how Miss. Eternal got through.

First, a little background about Centillion. The base idea behind Centillion started off as a spin-off from the classic binary search. Realising binary search needs to be tweaked, Centillion made their own Centillion File System, removed all the nuts and bolts from a popular operating system and made a Centillion Operating System, and used machines which you and I thought unfit to use at banks. Nobody really understands how, why or how well any of these work, but virtue of being done by Centillion, all of these pieces of work are considered the best!

A little about Miss Eternal. Miss Eternal is extremely passionate about what she does. (She even has a heart of gold to take care of the underprivileged). Miss Eternal has been researching in hot topics in compilers. She has written an entire file system, an entire compiler all on her own, and is now moving on to move the world with her groundbreaking ideas in compilers.

However, given the drastic requirements of entry into Centillion, some of which are ownership of an elephant seal, no interests in life other than academics and a brain that can store more information than your 1TB hard disk, it makes it clear that Eternal does not deserve to get into Centillion. However, still, she has somehow made it in! Intelligence reports suggests that Eternal may work on any of the topics below:

Future of what Miss Eternal may work on in Centillion:

1. Centillion Homework System: Eternal may well add another leaf in Centillion’s cap by writing the first system that takes assignment questions and outputs code, thereby making more information accessible. This however, has vehement opposition from the intellectual community since it trivializes their lifetime of work and make graduate students’ lives easier. But Eternal is determined to fight against all odds and win.

2. Centillion Operating System: Miss Eternal has written the filesystem for the operating system already. All that is a while(1) loop that runs till the reset button is hit.

3. Centillion Algorithm Designer: Being extremely passionate about algorithms and working on them for hours at a stretch, Eternal is no doubt the master of Algorithms at my University. She has also mastered the fundamentals of programming languages, and is currently working on a compiler that will compile a language called APL (Algorithmic Programming Language) that, given an algorithm in plain text, writes code! (Expressions still cannot have side effects, though).

4. Centillion Thesis Writer: Being a graduate student and spending the last intriguing 24 hours before a deadline trying to decipher LaTeX error messages such as “Warning: underfull and overfull hbox”, has motivated Eternal to work in this area and improve the life of graduate students. She could work on a tool, that, given a thesis topic, draws figures and writes descriptions (everyone steals from wikipedia anyways.. so why not automate it?).

5. Centillion Mail: CMail is by far the best email service in existence. Eternal plans to take it to new levels by writing several tools for graduate students such as “Automated Over-enthusiastic Professor Reply” (professors who email you at 3am and expect a reply in half-hour), “Automated Frustrated Graduate Student detection” (signs of which are tendency to delete orkut profile, write nasty stuff in emails intended to professors, then undo them out of fear) and to top it all, “Automated Professor Text Disambiguator” which serves to disambiguate mails written by professors and put in plain english what the professor meant.

PS: All names and descriptions by no means mock anyone! I sincerely apologise if any of my original thoughts above happen to conflict with something that already exists in the world!

FAIL!

All Indians know the phrase “Unity in diversity” and know what it stands for.

Well.. I am real surprised by this phrase, because it certainly doesn’t hold good! As a matter of fact, Indians are the least united group – starting from that 7/11 guy across the road who would, at the slightest provocation from a fellow Indian, shoot him down with the shotgun under his desk, to more important people in one’s daily life! (For people not in US: 7/11 is a grocery/convenience store; many are owned by Indians).

I was in this Indian restaurant last week (and I swear that is the last time I will visit an Indian restaurant in the US), and the owner was all smiles to customers, and walked around every table and made sure things were good. Well.. almost all tables – I mean the tables with no Indians. We took a table, and he put up a grouchy face. I ordered a milkshake (2$), and he stated in a baritone – “Credit card minimum order 3$”. Things got funnier next – there was a small container of chutney in our table. Quite soon, a table of Iranians ran out of chutney and asked for some more. Our grouchy Indian friend picked the one from our table and gave it to the Iranians! What manners! I mean.. you got to ask, at least!!

Things got more interesting when a gentleman from his city in India turned up at the restaurant.This gentleman asked our Indian friend where he is from. He turned up a grouchier-than-usual face and replied “Stone and Fort Lowell”, which is an intersection in Tucson! This guy was taken aback and told him he is from Bandra, a beautiful suburb of Mumbai. Our friend was least impressed and imposed the next question “Any orders, sir?” – yeah someone comes into your restaurant to chat with the owner. This poor guy asked for some stuff which was unfortunately less than 3$. Our friend barked the same dialogue again – “Credit card minimum order 3$”.

El Paso, Texas – the last city in North America. If you dare run the 301’st metre from downtown El Paso, and try to step back, you’ll be shot dead by the US border police ;). For those who don’t know, El Paso Del Norte is the one of the few legal road entrances to North America, and is a beautiful city!

All through the trip, I ate and slept, in between spells of eating and sleeping, with heavy caffeine in between to assist in digestion ;). One fine night, Ashwin and Iwent to an Arabian restaurant. We ordered some rice, tomatoes, onions and capsicum. For the price charged, the owner could have claimed he got the items shipped from Arabia to his restaurant, and it would be believable. We were in no mood to talk terms to a guy who would have us grilled and served for the next meal. We ended up bartering our purses to pay for the food. Realising that we still had our clothes to barter, we decided we might as well as have a good time. We next headed to Cafe Coffee Day Starbucks coffee, and had 2 coffees – 1 cold, 1 hot, one for each hand! That explains the title! 🙂 All in all, a good 45$ burnt in 2 hours 🙂

As with any of my trips, I got caught next to a character this time as well! This time, it was a shady Mexican guy. El Paso, being the Mexican border, naturally attracts a lot of Mexicans to the greyhound service. This time, I was the only non-mexican in the bus. Families of Mexicans thronged the bus, waiting to explore the Country of plenty….

Below is a chat with a friend of mine, who is normally fine (normal = never). He had to pick up a pair of headphones from my house. The problem is how to do it amidst his hectic schedule. (It will take a round trip of 3 hours at most to come to my house and return).

This is perfectly how not to solve it!The art of giving excuses for every possible solution I suggest. I even went down to the level of stopping on my knees to get these to him!

We captured a terrorist live on cam, shooting people, got his confession, got a confession from his dad, got eyewitnesses and all sorts of evidence.Now, after all the poor policemen and NSGs who gave up their life (esp. Tukaram Omble who let the terrorist rip through his body while holding the terrorist’s gun, letting him be captured), we decide to let the Indian Judicial System take care of him (i.e take care of him like a son).

Studies suggest that terrorists tend to live longer in Indian prisons than outside due to state-of-the-art medical facilities, chicken biryani and other amenities.

Do we need to be reminded that IC 814 which was hijacked to let loose Maulana Masood Azhar, who was kept alive and fed with chicken biryani to the brim in spite of being convicted using every inch of his body to do bad?

Why even keep that guy alive and give a chance for the next hijacking to release him? I mean.. the amenities provided by the Indian Judicial System should be restricted to Indians only!

p.s. I had this post titled “Next terror attack: Plane hijacking”, but that would have made Google think I am a terrorist 😀